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19 February 2025

What Mia did next

As we prepare for the 2025 Young Arts Open competition, we were delighted to receive an update from previous multi-award winner Mia Grewal about what she has been working on since her success in last year’s competition.

"My father asked me to design a poster for his feature film Ride the Snake's premiere. I'm a horror buff (movies and TV) and I love art, so I saw this as an opportunity to combine both interests and to step out of my comfort zone by trying something artistic that I had never tried before. It was an opportunity for me to collaborate with my father on a new and quite different artistic concept to the ones I've been used to.

"Creatively, the biggest challenge I faced was to find the best image and typography to promote the film properly. To inspire me, I researched other movie posters, I read up about snakes (yuk!) and looked through the still photos from the film. Here I found an amazing image of the character 'Harper' in a big close-up looking shocked and scared. In the background was the character of 'Singh' looking ghostly and I thought this paid homage to horror films and the plot of the film.

"I also had an idea for a poster which featured the title Ride the Snake written across a close up of a snake's scaly body. Getting the wording and shadowing of the Ride the Snake title to go along the snake's body in the right perspective took a lot of time but it looked good. However, my father felt that the first design idea was more representative of the film, it would make a more eye-catching poster and would promote the film the best.

"It was an artistic challenge to turn a photo into a poster and there were a few technical challenges including getting the right apps to design it properly, especially with the typography - the 'S' for the Snake in the title for example - and getting the fonts right…so many fonts to choose from!

"The poster was a great success at the film's special screening in London and, to date, we have sold half of the 50 limited edition and signed prints. I enjoyed this experience very much. It was difficult at times, but I learnt a lot and I hope that my work on the Ride the Snake poster will help me to take my future career as an art scholar at Wisbech Grammar School to the next level."

The Young Arts Open is a free, open submission art competition for young people aged 18 and under living, working, or studying in the districts of Fenland, West Norfolk, or South Holland. The exhibition is in its third year and is organised by Wisbech and Fenland Museum and supported by 20Twenty Productions CIC.